Republicans talking as and the um as spoken to have I got the inspiration for the talk of the media that the global diplomacy lab last year in Montreal and it's today we're going to talk about how communities use technology to improve democracy the world would have some minutes per question at the end of the talk so feel free to submit them and the best slide . d overlinking hash API 17

00:49

in it's pretty easy and you won't have to remember the questions and to the end of the talk let's get started let's start of the communities were going to take a look at the detect communities these are networks of volunteers who use their text kill the coding skills that aside

01:08

skills and many more to build tools for citizens that helped improve the communication between citizens and the state that make participation easier dead and improve access to information and many more so in short there leveraging technology for the common good we're taking we're going to take a look at 2 communities in specific M and network in Taiwan where the L eq comes from and 1 in Germany widely used to Germany's kind of obvious because it's the country that conveniently as surrounding this building and Taiwan is great because it had has 1 of the biggest and most active civic tech communities worldwide there's a lot of cutting edge tech development going on there and what other very interesting is that the internet and democracy able to gather around the same time in Taiwan so you have a generation

02:04

off 30 + here all steps grew up with the opportunities of the internet and this new political system so CL tell us a little bit more about Taiwan so actually people like GSEA partly very new to about democracy last generations so there's still quite eager to do participation and trying to shape how democracy is particularly with the knowledge which is the of our 1 so we now see actually a lot of collaboration between

02:32

technologies and also the traditional walkers were here on various issues so since 2012 a lot of controversial issues like this that is is in great debate in the society or cause like huge probe has of half million people on street on such as government spending and and financial Debussy and the human rights in military and the trade deal with China which is always a big problem and pension reform and all other controversial legislation so this time actually make a lot of it acknowledges think maybe their skills can be used to go out to build the new tools for the general public to more to understand these issues before the start of state and then take actions in

03:22

this is the integral of the spec right so for those of you who are not too familiar or not too sure where Taiwanese it's right there very tiny compared to Germany right about 23 million people and uh we 6 hours in the future so of inches so the

03:41

community in Taiwan we started is called got 0 . 2 W so it's basically that replacing the deal the of the government with a 0 in like it's hoping that we can build alpha version of the government website or services and for a long time that the user of the governor what so

03:58

we just have to change 1 character in the you out and in and suddenly you have better what's I was using new technology or providing open data so the community in time when we started in 2012 of quickly check the other all other professions of young software developers so light and writers in the lawyers designers is started to like and collaborate in very unusual way that's not happening in their professional before and so it's like the open source way of collaboration but for different people as well and even public servants are coming to our events and working together from different agencies which they they never talk to each other for so 1 example is that of build groups we build and the Congress websites called a wide i . gov . tw so we build a community version called a white that

04:52

G 0 . 2 w which combines all

04:55

the different and our information about my

04:58

past performance of the Congress member of

05:01

you know when they're in local council and also

05:03

there are financial disclosure and the on the belonging to talk about that in the the everything together so that's the community builds a version of the conference website so the governs community not only graze the release only really is often mentality of open source that allowed of active collaboration and people trying to work on existing tools and people have all also developed very strong to work culture so people just start doing things without our like having to have a grand meeting 1st so basically when they see something that can be done we start doing it that's why we call on the fork the government in the title of this section because we just start building something experimental so to date more than 3 thousand people have contributed their ideas so cold or patches or fixes to over 100 0 project of 2012 the and the Lodi 1 in Germany is separated by thousands of kilometers it took as c L 15 hours to get here and the characters are a bit different and yet those to detect communities of tackling similar issues and you see that in a 2nd in Germany the volunteer effort is called code for Germany there's 25 laps in cities all across the country and and they're working on like pushing openness and transparency and and unlike high 1 inch Germany's existing talking about that democracies democracy and has been around for a while that and they're and 1 more reminders that we that we shouldn't take that for granted that there's always at room for improvement and that democracy has to be filled with life this is why the thematic focus of the code for Germany this uh community this here will be on the upcoming elections I don't know whether you know that the most successful acidic tech tool inseminated bottom not evoke matching machine I'm sure led many have tried it out it's a path that helps you to compare your opinion infused with an election programs so in the upcoming months the community wants to explore and more

07:14

useful to loose ends and that helped to make access to this information easier and that encourage people to vote and 1 of our focus will be on opening up polling station data because currently you only receive a letter and you can see a nearest polling stations or you can visit your CDs website I believe so we think that to open up a polling station data will help people to easier find the next morning case so now you might ask yourself how why are there are those people at that are in this the at time and working on these topics

07:49

ends and trying to push this topics is there think I'd the government and government and public and is the administration's already working on it shouldn't with an infrastructure and well yes air they are working on the thing is that if you see legend appalling

08:06

station they they example and and the fact that it's not accessible and for whatever reason and you can see that it's still very limited how people can access information and how that knowledge is put to use in this context so the actual problem of that is the government are just trying to apply the new technology into their existing paper process without rethinking the possibility of technology so like all these promises of new form of participation in the more feedback channel from the citizen and better communication or or or so on or just while still promises because they're not really thinking all the possibility of topology so now let's of trying to imagine your cycle isn't very by you they did so and you want to

08:53

find out where dangerous roles are and where accidents are happening so naturally and how they can be improved so you've always trying to think maybe our will will build up website the collectibles opinion and there there was some me that where a dangerous roles are and

09:08

then you would create some create community of cyclists in Berlin that will help the government improve this need to be fixed 1st right and so that you can then duals analysis and research pattern and the weather comparison and so on and some of you might remember in AD 2013 the Berlin Senate actually did that they collected information on dangerous intersection on an accident hotspot and so this was a big like crowdsourcing and participation project and within 1 month 8 thousand people commented dead and I gave leg suggestions on how to improve except in the section which is really cool it would be

09:49

easy to pick like a complete meal at e-government project but this 1 was actually pretty great because a lot of people collaborative but then instead of leveraging the full potential of the collection of data points and comments and sharing it back to the community all people got out of this was the reports on I can make look at the thing and see OK here the most dangerous intersections and here's some recommendations from citizens and they even thought about sharing the data but I can't I was not able to find that neither back then or now so imagine what he could have done with all these datasets and raw information that services could have included it in there like and rounding and could have warned cyclists or you could have overlaid with actual police data to see like doesn't match and you could have overlaid of construction activities and many many more but instead of leveraging these opportunities all that was issued with the report so as excessive crops and finding the band like not really like using and the potential that like this you collection of the that could have given us so I'm so what can

11:03

we fix that so long but that's good reason the government of being slow and they're not using the latest technology because they have to be reliable and that they have their accountability issues so because their services also need to be inclusive and secure for everyone to use right but in the meantime the government's missing out all this new technology that are and they should be open for this new opportunity that the that advanced technologies

11:28

brain and the new ways of building digital services are especially with human-centered design what this isn't actually needs so how can this up like that the process be improved so we're going to give you a couple examples in there that's coming from both the powers community engines in Germany's community on the 1st 1 is financial transparency and so on the left-hand side you see the official budgets of report which is about 500 pages PDF so a couple years ago we built of something to extract all the data and a visualization of the budget according to ministry and the type of business and you can also see the history of individual entry of the budget and was actually the 1st part and the Cubs 0 communities and about 3 years later on because

12:18

the Taipei City government of they're trying

12:20

to all of us Father of

12:23

participatory budgeting of projects and then someone told me hey you can actually do but it's about if the people don't know the existing budget right because it would be really we're delighted proposing something that you're already pointed to so the mayor said OK also what we do and so on in the community say hey the becoming action build a tool to show the budgets we can actually use that thing and and applied it to the city government's project so actually so they took the quote from our project budget log of 0 the 2 of you and turn into official way of displaying budget that's a budget of Taipei on so on date of edition due to that actually collect feedback on individual budget line and then people can common and I within 30 days all the agencies will respond to the inquiry about the budget yeah and here's to a from Germany around parliamentary transparency that I really liked and it's a tool that helps

13:20

increase the transparency this developed by based as developer from Munich who in his spare time builds tools like this the 2 is

13:28

called clan and timing and add to give you a bit of a context of translation in China many opposition parties can file so called clan and firing parliamentarian quick and and the government has to respond so clan and find a basically a pretty good accountability tool that can give you lots of insights and the great thing is that all the files are made public to and the citizens but here's the floor only in PDF format format which are kind of hard to access to find the pdf are also scattered across numerous government websites which makes it even harder to find behind like as search interfaces and so on so the pt is that why there's this treasure trove of information available to the public and the high barriers to entry prevents the data from the from actually being and put to good use so much me into decided to change that so he's scraped all the PDF documents he indexed and he made them searchable healing them based on Ministry and add content that the website 10 and 5 and the it when visit did you have over 60 thousand documented the affinity it and you have full text search you can subscribe to actions that search terms so the interested in minimum wage and then you can subscribe to this search down and take get a

14:51

notification whenever the topic that comes up and you can link to the individual documents which is also a new thing and yesterday inspired by paying the pain collectives and and actually when I searched for arms arms

15:08

experts in this database and it gives you 65 different documents that you can let few in this list when you

15:15

click 1 that's the detailed view that lets you extract data from this very injury and add this a great tool not only for the general public but also for researchers for journalists and which I think is like the most interesting fact the eyes of public administration because what we found is that

15:35

the parliamentary recess this is linking to this too is that the community basically developed a tool that might be easier to use than official government to lose like easier to link to and as you can see a bunch of reports that have like the you're elves and and directing to this to it that an example from Germany and now another 1 from Taiwan explain so there was

16:01

a a controversial legislation about the chance of of the neighbors standard called like defining maximum hours you can work every week and then in a community of

16:11

people build a calculator that's displaying if you just put into like the regular hours to work each day in the week and which is still you like the current version of the larval and propose version by the government and some proposals other proposed version from the and you all know how the differences but we are for example you would get more over the time and or is entirely legal for you to work on weekends and so this tool was built by selling

16:37

the community but then the Ministry of Labour part started to think 0 maybe we can use this thing to communicate with the general public about our legislation so they actually took this and then I think some of the more the use of text in it and then and then hour so when I take this call them also contribute back to the community communities version and then on the use this 1 too long show the people how the proposed version will be looking like and I think this is going to sign up for example we've seen we can see the that in our 1st example with the budget the government something back which is kind of an impressive that it's 1 of the very few examples that I know of and as that I hope this is also going to happen in Germany and like the next couple of years and the 2nd example so in the court labor core operator which is sold a government not just use the source called the more important the along with the cold is the mentality that behind the comments that all legislation was the people you effects so hopefully this will be a

17:46

priest standard for future legislation people of the legislature would often room to start thinking about how long OK how do we that this is a proposed legislation to the general public how would this affect people and how do we tell them what happened and for Maximilian's example direction and find to public administrations are

18:05

using it so next great that with 2 will improve access to information make it easier for comedians xt and yet receive all this information without having to scrape pdfs and of course it would also be awesome if and the government and public administration which is reuse source code because it's an open source tool for later use inspiration to develop a similar to so

18:31

all this project we mention or developed by engage citizens by volunteers in their spare time and all with the help from others in the community even global community so hackers are using their skills and that no house on to show the possibility of emerging technology in our civic life always the mission that citizen participation

18:52

should be what I will be accessible and and impactful on so the complex problem of now we're facing in the goal of art in the future it would need to be solved together by all of us so these were just some few examples there about like from the active set community around the world and there is also a good network of 4 for for people in various countries doing the same thing called call full so you can check out uncle 4 . org and remote but and in September this year will be hosting the 1st ever arson attack entire 1 of 4 people around the world to share their experiences the how they all do this kind of thing was technology and end of work or our collaborate with government were not yet indefinitely if they wanted to thank the deal with diplomacy let that made it possible for the L to travel all the way to here and at the latter's initiative which is based in the Federal Foreign Office and it's exploring new and more inclusive and

19:51

diplomacy that goes beyond the traditional politics so thank you all for listening thank the promised land and yet few have things that I want to know how to cover the slide and someone have a question and answer check that the sliding walls any questions yeah the question I am I think if I talk I was wondering when you mention the participating budgeting program how Taillon it's and handling digital divide issues or even the

20:37

question is how is the internet distributed over Taiwan the background for the internet coverage and how 1 is pretty pretty good I suppose I think thing 85 per cent of the households have broadband and of forward but still on in things like citizen participation in data budget on their posting not just online presentation but also like real world are to be more inclusive so I can I can tell you a bit more detail about the budget thing about project Taipei are with you want and on but just want give a quick background about it the digital divide situation any more questions to sell all you you

21:27

know who that the person who did so the examples that you gave world taking data that's been released by governments and remixing that into a form that makes more sense to have any insights into what you do in a case were governments not releasing information on doesn't mean we have them yeah how did that in in Thailand

21:53

and so the community generally only work with the information that's only available there is 1 case that it's about him and financing the details so that information was supposed to be public but they're public inside a building you have to go there was the idea knowledge and give you a paper copy of that so it was NGO Oleg mobilizer quite a few thousand people to go there every day and they just copied out and go to print shop standard free online and then people created a program to try and all the scanned document into a catch-up program so by like playing against entering the number you see on the screen so this is like a group of example of this disruption like the 1st batch of that they about 300 thousand entries and about 10 thousand people participated in 24 hours and digitize everything but I'm still of we are still trying to push the government or the heart of the is actually an auditing office to actually release that data in digital form because or they were use in paper form you and what we have to list innovation without permission so you ask make you ask if you if they give you the data and if you have good reasons why you think it should be accessible to everyone you just created and take it and and spread it

23:17

you know regression presentation and some of the tools that you presented here seem kind of similar to tools that I've seen people working against corruption in for example the Ukraine have using to try to

23:31

show what the national budget was like to make sure that you could see OK how is your money being spent on how you think should be spent and how do you then see where money is disappearing How could we make sure that the tools are being created can be shared across the world and also go to places where we need activists who actually fight to get information out of the Government's where the government's on giving it willingly the question is how can we make sure that people know about it and that the can we for example share the code that's being developed in Taiwan with other places and is and global diplomacy lab trying to make sure that this code is being shared and to

24:13

activists in other countries that aren't as fortunate as people living in germany at time 1 and I think 1 very important

24:21

in this uh very important thing when we talk about like redeployment is that you cannot just take a piece of code and apply it to a completely different and cultural contexts so you always have to keep in mind the culture context and also that you have to adapt steps so this notion of redeployment and just like rolling it out across the world does not really work but I think that's too late bring developers together with Lake people who have expertise around certain issues in their home countries I think that's the that's the way to go for it and there is a form of code replications brains where exactly that is being being done where like a piece of technology is taken and a redeployed but also with the next larger context in mind so the colorful network around will collaborate collaborators that and make sure people know what's going on in which country develop something interesting and like GSA you sometimes not possible to redeploy in but we do see a few examples but in the meantime what will happen is usually some some kind of standard or or best practice come out from the collaboration and people know a page 1 to tackle this problem here are the components you can use already and here are the standard and then we did it is converted government data into the standard then it will be available to all the schools thank you very much sir thank you see I think you you you you you you search um there and at

Inhaltliche Metadaten

How can civic hackers help governments to get more people to participate, to make information accessible and to create better services - In short: How can collaboration in civic tech improve democracy?